Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw

https://discuss.ai.google.dev/t/account-restricted-without-warning-google-ai-ultra-oauth-via-openclaw/122778

by srigi • 5 months ago

802 605 5 months ago

discuss.ai.google.dev

verdverm• 5 months ago

Anthropic did something similar too didn't they, iirc it was blocking 3rd party tools from the subscription plans?

Sounds like the same here. Are they against to ToS in either case?

tadfisher• 5 months ago

Anthropic blocked the tools, not the entire account. But in Google's case they allowed the integration connection in the first place, so if it is against TOS then they have an obvious product gap.

fastball3• 5 months ago

Anthropic has definitely been banning accounts for using non-Anthropic tools with subscription OAuth tokens.

krick• 5 months ago

Thanks, Google.

dnw• 5 months ago

This is like ISPs banning customers in the 90s for using Napster to download music.

Mistletoe• 5 months ago

Or when I would try and place ads in newspapers for my internet companies and they wouldn’t run them because they “don’t run ads for competitors”, okay then, how did that work out for you? Did you stop the internet?

fastball3• 5 months ago

ISPs still do this.

Obviously not with Napster, but they will close your account for piracy.

esskay2• 5 months ago

Depends where you live, in most places they don't bother anymore, in the few that they do a VPN obviously gets around it but it's incredibly unlikely you'd be doing enough to ever be on the radar let alone get caught. That battle was lost long ago.

FootballMuse• 5 months ago

Same for using OpenCode.

https://github.com/jenslys/opencode-gemini-auth/issues/50

https://github.com/NoeFabris/opencode-antigravity-auth/issue...

https://github.com/jenslys/opencode-gemini-auth/issues/50

Some additional discussion on Reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/google_antigravity/comments/1r2hnn8...

free652• 5 months ago

Looks like they are banning for using Gemini CLI / antigravity (subscription) endpoints instead of using Gemini API (pay as you go) endpoints.

bethekind• 5 months ago

This is draconian.

Our investigation specifically confirmed that the use of your credentials within the third-party tool “open claw” for testing purposes constitutes a violation of the Google Terms of Service [1]. This is due to the use of Antigravity servers to power a non-Antigravity product. I must be transparent and inform you that, in accordance with Google’s policy, this situation falls under a zero tolerance policy, and we are unable to reverse the suspension. I am truly sorry to share this difficult news with you.

cogman10• 5 months ago

Oh man.

What a wonderful way to stop people from using your LLM.

All these AI companies trying to get everyone to be locked into their toolchains is just hilariously short sighted. Particularly for dev tools. It's the sure path to get devs to hate your product.

And for what? The devs are already paying a pretty penny to use your LLM. Why do you also need to force them to using your toolkit?

esskay2• 5 months ago

I imagine its a case of the providers not wanting to admit its costing them a fortune because suddenly all these low-medium usage accounts are now their highest use ones.

Not saying it's right. But it's also not exactly a secret that they are all taking VERY heavy losses even with pricey subscriptions.

noosphr• 5 months ago

You are being subsidised to the tune of 50 to 99.9 cents on the dollar compared to the API.

What the hell do you expect? To get paid for using other people's tools on Google's servers?

usef-2• 5 months ago

There is a reality that when they control the client it can be significantly cheaper for them to run: the Claude code creator has mentioned that the client was carefully designed to maximise prompt caching. If you use a different client, your usage patterns can be different and it may cost them significantly more to serve you.

This isn't a sudden change, either: they were always up-front that subscriptions are for their own clients/apps, and API is for external clients. They don't document the internal client API/auth (people extracted it).

I think a more valid complaint might be "The API costs too much" if you prefer alternative clients. But all providers are quite short on compute at the moment from what I hear, and they're likely prioritising what they subsidise.

llm_nerd• 5 months ago

The devs are paying to use the UIs provided by the company. The usage-based API is a separate offering, and everyone knows that.

It's okay to be annoyed at being caught, but honestly the deer in the headlights bit is a bit ridiculous.

If you want to use an API, pay for the API option. Or run your own models.

chasil• 5 months ago

Google has been particularly pernicious in the corporate exercise of zero-tolerance.

Because of their large footprint in so many areas, it is wise to greatly (re)consider expansion in the ways that you rely on them.

driverdan2• 5 months ago

Hopefully this gets people to stop using Google for more than just LLMs.

overgard4• 5 months ago

The tool thing is kind of infuriating at the moment. I've been using Claude on the command line so I can use my subscription. It's fine, but it also feels kind of silly, like I'm looking at ccusage and it seems like I'm using way more $ in tokens than I'm paying for with the subscription. Which is a win for me, but, I don't really feel like Claude Code is such a compelling product that it's going to keep me locked in to their model, so I don't know why they're creating such a steep discount to get me to use it. I'm perfectly fine using Codex's tools, or whatever. I dunno, it seems like way more cost effective to use the first party tools but I'm not sure why they really want that. Are the third party tools just really inefficient with API usage or something?

fy20• 5 months ago

Antigravity is useless anyway. I tried it last week and it needs approval for every file read and tool call. There's an option in the app to auto-approve, except it doesn't work. Plenty of complaints online about this. Clearly they don't actually care about the product, some exec just felt that they need to get into the editor game.

Next I tried using the Antigravity Gemini plan through OpenCode (I guess also a bannable offense?) and the first request used up my limit for the week.

Belphemur• 5 months ago

Basically Google is saying: You can't use Gemini with OAuth on other products than Google products (Anti Gravity).

I mean it's fair, just should have been documented properly and the possibility to use Gemini through OAuth restricted with proper scope instead of saying you broke the ToS we ban your 350$/ month account.

gck113• 5 months ago

Can openclaw go through gemini-cli? Because they can and nobody would notice anything has changed. It would use the same OAuth down the line and consume the same quotas.

8note3• 5 months ago

cant you just wrap it though?

swap out the direct api call with a call to gemini cli?

cgio• 5 months ago

That’s my question too. Presumably one could even build an API that just runs things in cli? How would they plan to restrict that? Based on usage patterns?

femiagbabiaka• 5 months ago

I'd assume API usage through tokens vs. OAuth are rate limited differently? I don't actually see hard numbers for Antigravity model rate limits on their website so guessing this is the case.

cube006• 5 months ago

It's not about the rate limit, it's about the price, raw API calls are far more expensive then subsidised Antigravity calls.

t-writescode2• 5 months ago

I [ctrl+f]'d for this comment in the thread linked above, and couldn't find it. May I ask where you saw that?

SilverSlash2• 5 months ago

Same. Cannot find it in that thread and I would like to know the source too.

cupantae• 5 months ago

It’s there. User Jun_Meng.

torginus• 5 months ago

Isn't the reason companies are doing this because they're offering tokens at a discount, provided they're spent through their tooling?

Considering the tremendous amount of tokens OpenClaw can burn for something that has nothing to do with sofware development, I think it's reasonable for Google to not allow using tokens reserved for Antigravity. I don't think there's such a restriction if you pay for the API out of pocket.

jacquesm12• 5 months ago

Isn't the reason companies are doing this because they're offering tokens at a discount, provided they're spent through their tooling?

Then maybe they should charge for that instead of banning accounts?

Google decided on their own business plan without any guns to their backs. If they decide to create a plan that is subsidized that's entirely on them.

jimbob45• 5 months ago

Then it should be “This is your first and final warning. The next time we catch you, it’s a ban.”. People are building their lives around this stuff and kneejerk bans erode good faith in your platform.

LegateLaurie• 5 months ago

Given how popular OpenClaw is (and that OpenClaw itself supports antigravity), I think it's shortsighted to not publicly state that it's not allowed and to warn users. Permanently banning people from Antigravity (much like any Google product) feels really harsh.

mark_l_watson5• 5 months ago

I agree. As others have mentioned here, the authenticate with AntiGravity web popup clearly says that this authentication is only to be used with Google products.

How can Claws users miss this?

What Google could have done better: obviously implement rate throttling on API calls authenticated through the Gemini AI Pro $20/month accounts. (I thought they did this, buy apparently not?) Google tries hard to get people to get API keys, which is what I do, and there seems to be a very large free tier on API calls before my credit card gets hit every month.

blitzar• 5 months ago

Can I at least log in one last time and download my gmail messages from 2004?

jacquesm12• 5 months ago

No, this is hilarious: company that rams their AI down your throat at every opportunity then turns around and shuts down your account because you actually use their AI... there is no limit to the idiocy around Google's AI roll-out. I wished I could donate the AI credits that I'm paying for (thanks Google for that price increase for a product I never chose to buy) to the people that need them more.

jcgrillo2• 5 months ago

This kind of reputational damage is just adding fuel to the fire. If my business depended in any way on google--GCP, GSuite, whatever--it would right now be a very urgent task to fire them and find replacements. They've been pretty sketchy for a while, but this kind of thing is over the top.

therealmarv• 5 months ago

How about giving the user a big warning to not do that and then block the account if the user continues. This total blocks are crazy. Especially for people who use their Google account for 20+ years or something.

jauntywundrkind2• 5 months ago

Google's bundling of so many services into one account is becoming a gargantuan liability for them & their users.

This "zero tolerance" policy is just absurdly mega-goliath out of touch with the world. The sort of soulless brain dead corporatism that absolutely does not think for even a single millisecond about its decisions, that doesn't care about anything other than reducing customer support or complexity, no matter what the cost.

Kicking people off their accounts for this is Google being willing to cause enormous untoward damage. With basically not even the faintest willingness to try to correct. Gobsmacking vicious indifference, ok with suffering.

overgard4• 5 months ago

It seems like a temp ban here would be totally reasonable, like, "we disabled your account for a day here's why, don't do it again". Permanent though, eek!

moontear3• 5 months ago

Time and time again it is shown to *not* use your main account for everything. This goes for Apple and having a separate account for development work, for the App Store and your main iCloud account but this also goes for all other SaaS providers.

You are doing groundbreaking new and untested stuff with Claw? Do not use your main account. You want to access your main account's data? Sure, allow it via OAUTH/whatever possible way.

Have separate accounts, people. You don't want one product groups decision in those large SaaS corps to impact everything else.

TrackerFF2• 5 months ago

Nothing new. 10 years ago my (now 20+ year) google account was compromised for a whole 5 minutes. It was used by shady bots, and instantly banned. No warnings, no nothing. Trying to figure out what had happened was a challenge in itself.

Getting through to customer support was impossible.

5 years later I tried to get my account opened up, filled out some forms, and by some miracle it was.

My biggest takeaway from this (other than enabling 2FA) was that it is probably easier to get ahold of the scammers that control your account, than to get ahold of actual human customer support at google / alphabet.

SilverElfin2• 5 months ago

It’s protectionism. These corporations are staying big because of anti competitive practices and capital. They don’t want to let go.

dmix4• 5 months ago

That’s called protecting a monopoly not protectionism

nucleative• 5 months ago

I cannot de-Google fast enough.

So if I ask Google's AI studio the wrong question, I might get my G-drive, Gmail, API access, Play store, YouTube channel, "login with Google" tokens, and more all ripped away instantly with no recourse?

No thanks

dmix4• 5 months ago

It’s an extremely strong incentive to not use Gemini for anything serious

ninjagoo2• 5 months ago

Google is a company well down the path of enshittification, they even got rid of their motto "Don't be evil".

As a consumer, you're better served by using services from companies earlier in that lifecycle, where value accrues to you, and that's not Google, and likely not many other big providers.

When those newer companies turn, you switch. Do not allow yourself to get locked into an ecosystem. It's hard work, but it will pay dividends in the long run.

sathish316• 5 months ago

Google is a copycat in AI products.

Gemini Chat: ChatGPT

Gemini CLI: Claude Code

Antigravity: Cursor

Nano banana: Midjourney

Subscription API ban: copied Anthropic

NotebookLM seems to be the only exception, or it could be an acquisition.

Subscription API ban could be part of a larger strategy because of OpenClaw’s association with OpenAI and Google will not be able to copy OpenClaw Personal Assistant model due to the security implications.

Pay as you go through API pricing is one of the easiest ways to drastically reduce mass adoption of a product. Pay per month works on consumption patterns where 80% of the users will barely use the product to compensate for the other 10 or 20% power users.

anon848736283• 5 months ago

Can you help me understand which of these happened?

1) Open Claw has a Google OAuth client id that users are signing in with. (This seems unlikely because why would Google have approved the client or not banned it)

2) Users are creating their own OAuth client id for signing themselves into Open Claw. (Again, why would these clients be able to use APIs Google doesn't want them to?)

3) Users are taking a token minted with the Antigravity client and using it in Open Claw to call "private" APIs.

Assuming it's #3, how is that physically accomplished? And then how does Google figure out it happened?

moontear3• 5 months ago

"how does Google figure out it happened" - no insider knowledge, but the calls Claw makes are very different than the regular IDE, so the calls and volume alone would be an indicator. Maybe Google has even updated their Antigravity IDEs to just include some other User Agent, that Claw auth does not have.

Everything just guesswork, but I don't think it is too hard to figure out whether it is Antigravity calling the APIs or any Claw.

overgard4• 5 months ago

Yikes!! This is really unfortunate, because Google's models seem very good but there's no way I'm using a google service for this kind of thing with those policies. I don't even want to run OpenClaw, but that's scary! Plus, I have my google account tied to authenticating so many things that if my account were to be suspended or something that would be a nightmare.

I haven't tried Antigravity but I remember on release it had huge UX issues. Is this product just not ready for primetime?

ludjer2• 5 months ago

There is nothing stopping you from using google models just get the correct product, you can pay for tokens then they do not care what you use it for.

user2057382• 5 months ago

Just create another Google account. I don't remember there being any restrictions for this. Every time the service required a Google account to log in or it was easier than registering and going through the checks, I just created a new Google account and registered.

mark_l_watson5• 5 months ago

Excuse me giving you advice, unasked for: as part of your ‘digital life spring cleaning’ spend some time converting auth with Google/Apple/GitHub for services to logging in with your email (on your own domain) and some other second auth.

BTW, I tend to only use Google for services I pay for (YouTube+, APIs, Gemini Plus, sometimes GCP).

petesergeant• 5 months ago

Using Google for anything other than search and email has been a poor choice for a long time.

infecto5• 5 months ago

Maybe the ban is overstepping but I still continue to not understand the issue. Rarely in the history of APIs has a commercial company wanted folks to use the private APIs.

blibble2• 5 months ago

a preview of things to come, when the entire software trade is reliant on these third party services

all hosted by companies so huge they consider your $200/month to be an annoyance

rather than something valuable

MattDaEskimo• 5 months ago

I'm very confused here. The monthly plans are meant to be used inside of Google's walled garden, but people are somehow able to capture (?) and re-use the oAuth token?

Regardless, I thought it was pretty obvious that things like OpenClaw require an API account, and not a subsidized monthly plan.

zythyx2• 5 months ago

Exactly, OpenClaw (or I think possibly an addon/extension or unofficial method) is allowing Googles Antigravity authentication to connect the app. This allows for 'unlimited' calls through Antigravity models with a subscription, instead of the proper Gemini/Google AI Studio API key method (charged per million tokens)

API usage can get very high for automatic operations, especially with apps like Kilo/Roo/Cline, and now with OpenCode/OpenClaw. I often blast through $10-20 in a single day of just regular OpenCode usage through OpenRouter

If I could pay a subscription and get near unlimited use (with rate limits), of course I'd do that, but not like this. I'm pretty sure Antigravity has ToU somewhere that indicates it's only allowed for use in Antigravity and nowhere else, since I've seen other threads on this happening: https://github.com/jenslys/opencode-gemini-auth/issues/50

Aerroon• 5 months ago

and get near unlimited use (with rate limits)

But they're not near unlimited though. They're just hidden limits.

jauntywundrkind2• 5 months ago

Sure. But a zero strike getting kicked out of your Google account is a grotesque evil.

Edit: maybe it's not the whole account? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47116330

__w1kke___• 5 months ago

No - use OpenAI, no problem. OpenAI wins here big time.

avazhi• 5 months ago

Google deciding to willy nilly unilaterally ban my 20+ year old primary Google account is probably my greatest internet fear, given how famously awful their support is. Seems like it's the singular best example of a tech company so big that through some combination of internal silos and TOS bureaucracy you have no shot of getting your account back, no matter how unreasonable the ban actually is.

A while back I made completely separate Google accounts for YouTube and Maps just so my longstanding Gmail account wouldn't get banned if the system somehow detected that my Youtube account for example breached Google's TOS.

ocdtrekkie• 5 months ago

If you are this afraid of your Gmail getting banned, I don't understand why that wouldn't translate to... moving off of Gmail. It's not even a very good service, it's slow and bad at spam detection. Leave an autoforwarder and go.

g947o• 5 months ago

Which is exactly why I de-Googled much of my digital life (email, notes, password management, photos, chatbot, browser etc) except where there is no reasonable/practical alternative. The "main" account is only for those things and for old contacts in case someone reaches me via the old email. I use a secondary Google account for anything that is remotely risky.

chongli• 5 months ago

Friendly reminder that Google Takeout [1] exists. When I read a story a few years ago about a guy who had his primary Google account banned with no recourse (for reselling Pixel phones) and permanently lost 20 years worth of emails and family photos, I researched and found Takeout and used it to back up all my data, then subsequently stopped using Google services altogether (apart from YouTube).

[1] https://takeout.google.com/

PacificSpecific• 5 months ago

Thank you for this. I had no idea this existed.

stevage2• 5 months ago

That doesn't solve all issues, such as services you have signed up to using your Gmail account.

teshigahara• 5 months ago

Unfortunately the service is very buggy in my experience. When I tried to download all of my photos data multiple times it gave me corrupted .zip files and half of the files were just zero bytes. Maybe I can blame Firefox for that though, I dunno. I should probably try again with Chrome before completely blaming Google

mihaelm• 5 months ago

I moved off Gmail exactly because I didn’t want to be fresh out of luck if I ever need support.

It’s free so I’m not going to complain, but for something as vital as an e-mail, I’m willing to pay for a service to have some peace of mind.

mdavidn• 5 months ago

Welcome to the club. I registered my own domain and moved my digital life off Google services 18 years ago for this exact reason. If you need another reason: They scan all of your e-mail to target ads at you and your associates. Do it. It's not that difficult!

My "new" mail provider fetches messages from Gmail to create a unified inbox, which helped with the transition. Today, I'm thinking of shutting this off given the volume of misaddressed e-mail and spam that arrives via Gmail.

lysace2• 5 months ago

To clarify: None of the comments in that thread talk about experiencing that. They have been locked out of the Gemini service, not their Google account with mail etc.

Source: I actually read them. Yes, personally. I didn't even have an LLM summarize them. I know, I'm practically a luddite.

sowbug6• 5 months ago

But when they paste support replies using terms like "suspension," "violation of the Google Terms of Service," and "zero-tolerance," it sounds like someone's close to losing access to their family photos.

blibble2• 5 months ago

A while back I made completely separate Google accounts for YouTube and Maps just so my longstanding Gmail account wouldn't get banned if the system somehow detected that my Youtube account for example breached Google's TOS.

I bet you that if they ban one they ban the other too

the only safe way is to get your important data out of Google entirely

after manifest v3's announcement, I de-googled: gmail, chrome, search, google cloud, photos, family on android phones

2 years later, it's all gone, except youtube

and if they ban that I don't care

londons_explore• 5 months ago

Linked bans pretty much only happen if you use the same recovery phone number or email address.

Other ways of linking an account, such as having both logged in on the same phone, don't put you at risk.

neilv• 5 months ago

I bet you that if they ban one they ban the other too

Related: I've had a suspicion that, if you have an Apple or Google app developer account through a company (in your name and recovery phone number, but company email address)... and you leave the company... you'd better hope that someone at the company doesn't then use the account to do something sketchy or rule-breaking.

Someone inheriting the account is a very real possibility, given motive (people can be lazy about figuring out how to set up the account for another developer, or not want to pay another fee), and opportunity (professionalism norm is to preserve all passwords/secrets in a way that is accessible to the company).

DANmode3• 5 months ago

Who did you move to from Gmail? How’d you make out?

randallsquared• 5 months ago

This is a major reason I haven't worked with Gemini much. Too many eggs in that basket to mess with it. Anthropic and OpenAI at least have no other baggage for me.

globalnode• 5 months ago

big company doesn't want you using something other than their stuff and they'll steal your money and ban you, or similarly, big company wants your data... this happens every day. its nice having choices isnt it? ill just leave this big company and use... oh wait. its another big company.

osiris970• 5 months ago

Sad, but inevitable. I guess only openai allows for this kind of usage now and copilot?

The only reason the subs are worth it to them, is to get you into their toolchain. It sucks but inevitable

smashah2• 5 months ago

Take your money to the Chinese companies instead. These evil megacorps are more interested in destroyed your privacy in service to the Epstein Cabal controlling every facet of your life. How dare Google, a trillion dollar company, charge you for AI ultra then ban you for using your own credits/usage allowance. This whole debacle, along with Anthropic, fall foul of The Digital Human Right to Adversarial Interoperability.

It is imperative that open source wins this battle. Not these evil megacorps and their substandard tools.

Are Google engineers so inept as to not be able to integrate technical measures against oc use? Do they think people using these plugins know the mechanisms used? And after all that they have the nerve to ban you from using their own products (AG). Ridiculous company.

poszlem• 5 months ago

Between this, and whatever Claude has been doing lately, like giving the AI the ability to just disconnect if it dislikes your prompt, I really hope more people realize that local LLMs are where it's at.

nacs• 5 months ago

I really hope more people realize that local LLMs are where it's at

No worries, the AI companites thought ahead - by sending GPU, RAM, and now even harddrive prices through the roof, you won't have a computer to run a local model.

bakugo• 5 months ago

I really hope more people realize that local LLMs are where it's at.

Maybe if you have the tens of thousands worth of hardware required to run models like DeepSeek, GLM or Kimi locally. Most people don't, though.

user2057382• 5 months ago

Why do most people need large language models?

And as far as I understand, the main contingent of HN is engineers, programmers, and even me, who works in a country (Russia) where the salary of an engineer is just tiny compared to Europe or the United States, it was not difficult to buy powerful enough equipment to run most large local models, train lora, then programmers who earn income in six-digit dollars it's even easier to do this.

usef-2• 5 months ago

Have you hit that? I thought it was only in extreme cases when Claude felt uncomfortable, like awful heavy psychological coercion. They wanted Claude not to be forced to reply endlessly.

atlgator• 5 months ago

It's the luxury gym membership model. They want you on the monthly subscription, but put up roadblocks that prevent use.

paxys4• 5 months ago

No they want you to pay for API use. Subscriptions are for first party products that they can control.

throwpoaster• 5 months ago

To be accurate, when you auth OpenClaw the Google page specifically says to not proceed unless you are authorizing a Google product.

I just assumed it was a warning about security breaches, not business plan breaches.

theturtletalks2• 5 months ago

I can guarantee in their attempt to stop OpenClaw users, some users using it normally will get caught in the dragnet. It could mean your whole Google account is suspended, not just for Antigravity.

I would highly encourage you to not only stop using Antigravity oAuth for OpenClaw, but to use Antigravity with a side account or stop using it altogether. Is using Antigravity worth losing your main account or getting it banned for using paid services (for extra storage, YouTube premium, etc). Even side accounts are risky since in the post thread people are saying Google applied the ban to all their accounts.

paxys4• 5 months ago

I don't know why people here can't accept the simple fact that AI companies are offering cheap "unlimited" plans as a loss leader to tie you to their ecosystem, and then make up for it via add-ons, upsells, ads etc. If you use those API tokens to access external services it defeats the purpose. The hack may have worked so far, mainly because no one was checking, but they are all going to tighten the access eventually (as Anthropic and Google have already done).

Either stick to first party products or pay for API use.

techpression3• 5 months ago

When reading HN I get the impression that a lot of people are convinced monthly plans are very profitable for the companies, I don’t have any numbers but to me it always seemed like a bait and switch or ”bait and make you pay with your data too”.

vineyardmike2• 5 months ago

I'll bite. I suspect that these plans aren't as intensely subsidized as people assume. I believe that API usage is probably also not subsidized at all. First, yes, subs are probably subsided, but I bet a significant % of users are profitable to serve, especially the "chat" users who don't use dev tools and have short context window conversations. Yes, I think the subs also exist as a driver to get lock-in and market share. Claude Code, for example, is very good and I stopped using their competition when they released their superior product.

That said, I assume that (1) their long-term goal is to create cheaper-to-serve models that fit within their pricing targets, and use the (temporarily) subsidized subscriptions to find the features and costs that best serve the market. Maybe even while capturing more margin on the API in comparison (eg keep API prices high while lowering cost to serve a token). I've largely stopped using Opus, and sometimes even chose to use Haiku, because the cheaper models are fast and usually serves my needs. It's very possible to work all-day and barely hit the usage limits with Haiku on the $20/mo option. Long term, that could be profitable outright.

And (2) subscriptions with lower SLOs than API calls have the potential to provide "infill" usage for high fixed-cost GPUs as an alternative to idling, similar to their batch APIs. I'd believe that overnight usage limits could/should be higher than during California work-hours. I assume most big providers have pre-paid fixed cost servers, so pumping more tokens through an otherwise idle GPU is "free". They can also do a lot more cost-optimization behind the scenes, such as prompt caching, to reduce the cost of tokens.

CuriouslyC• 5 months ago

OpenAI and the Chinese companies let you all you can eat openly. Anthropic's lead vs OAI is slight and these things are going to homogenize quickly. The market is going open and the people trying to keep it closed are just generating ill will pointlessly.

javascriptfan69• 5 months ago

So what are they supposed to do?

Race to burn as much cash as possible in hopes that the other goes bankrupt first?

These models aren't profitable at the fixed subscription tiers.

NewsaHackO5• 5 months ago

OpenAI and the Chinese companies let you all you can eat openly.

You say this, but I guarantee that when they do offer a plan similar to Google/Anthropic's dedicated coding "unlimited" subscription, they will do the exact same thing. Maybe they will let OpenClaw in as a first party because of their partnership with the creator.

cedws2• 5 months ago

Likely we'll just move to the Chinese models.

stevage2• 5 months ago

No one is shocked that they don't allow this. Everyone is shocked that they silently, permanently banned the user with no recourse and it took significant effort even to find out that much.

DavidPiper• 5 months ago

Sorry to be that guy, but given how often Google has done this for lesser infringements (some reported here on HN), is anyone really "shocked" by the permabans?

The apparent shock around this sort of thing always feels like cope for the fact that we (myself included) understand the power imbalance between Google and its customers but don't want to admit it.

There's plenty of evidence at this point, and I feel like we should be using that emotional energy to actually do something about it (like switching providers for critical personal services, for example).

danny_codes2• 5 months ago

Seems like a hassle when open source models are just as good. Can go with any hosting provider. Might have to wait 3-4 weeks for them to duplicate whatever Anthropic is doing with token caching. But then you get 10x cheaper inference.

I feel like this game is just a hot potato, can you get retail to hold the bag game

disiplus• 5 months ago

I have them all. They're not just as good. Whoever tells you that looked only at the benchmarks, not real use. They all fall short at some point.

Kimi K2.5 is the best one, but it's still not at the level of what Anthropic released with opus 4.5.

paxys4• 5 months ago

Open models are very far in performance from the top models of Anthropic, OpenAI and Google. And that's skipping over the fact you need somewhere to host them.

neop1x2• 5 months ago

Recent open-weights models(MiniMax, Kimi K2, GLM, Mistral) are also quite good, can be self-hosted or accessed through 3rd-party hosters or OpenRouter and they are sufficient for most of the tasks. Just stop paying overpriced "unlimited" subscription bul**hit.

paultendo• 5 months ago

Of course Google can restrict how their API is accessed. But locking paid accounts with no warning, no explanation email, and no functioning support path while continuing to charge $249/month is a different problem entirely. A reasonable enforcement process would have been a warning email, grace period to stop using the tool, then restriction.

What an awful way to lose trust, locking out their users but billing them all the same.

theturtletalks2• 5 months ago

I was using Antigravity the proper way, but why would I risk my account using this subpar software? OpenClaw and Opencode literally obfuscate the API call exactly like Antigravity calls it. Do you really trust Google to only catch misuse using this dragnet?

SilverSlash2• 5 months ago

Their "API" isn't what's being accessed here. As far as I understand it's using their subscription account oauth token in some third party app that's the issue here.

Aperocky2• 5 months ago

If they allowed oauth token to work like that then that is their (Google's) problem.

whywhywhywhy• 5 months ago

Google have always done this if they suspect you’ve broken TOS, if anything this is better than usual because usually you lose your Gmail and YouTube accounts too with no human to talk to about it.

artisin2• 5 months ago

Yup. Last week my Ultra account got ToS-banned from both the Gemini CLI and Antigravity simply for using OpenCode. Try as I might, I haven't been able to resolve the issue. I can technically still use the Gemini web/app, but it's remarkably terrible in just about every conceivable way. A truly impressive feat in itself.

xnx3• 5 months ago

Can you use Google AI Studio?

artisin2• 5 months ago

As of now, yes. However, a few months ago it was mentioned that Google is working on increasing the limits for Pro/Ultra subscribers. But if I can't get this ToS ban sorted out, I assume it'll follow my account when that update lands, and I'll end up being banned from AI Studio as well.

givemeethekeys• 5 months ago

Google opens claw! /s

christoff12• 5 months ago

Glad I saw this. I just installed openclaw on a fly.io machine to test out and planned to use my pro account.

alexandre_m• 5 months ago

It should be obvious that these services are operating at a loss. The monthly subscriptions especially, but I’m even skeptical that the linear API pricing is sustainable.

It feels like a classic “drug dealer” model to me. Get everyone hooked with cheap access, then raise prices later. Unless there’s a major breakthrough in the underlying technology, I don’t see how a significant price increase isn’t inevitable once adoption is locked in.

martinald2• 5 months ago

This seems unlikely while we have open weights models available that are ~as decent as the frontier ones.

Given the API prices for open weights models of similar size are 5-10x less than the frontier models the APIs are very profitable on a pure unit economics approach. I strongly suspect they make money off their monthly plans as well.

hapticmonkey• 5 months ago

Did people learn nothing from the rise, stall, and now fall of social networks?

Yes, AI can do some incredible things. But we’re also running full speed into an ecosystem controlled by 2 or 3 major companies. Running at a loss. A reality check is coming.

It’s not a technology problem. It’s an economic problem. People are too busy looking at the tech to notice.

hackit2• 5 months ago

I'm not concerned, they're accelerating research and development into hardware and more optimal models. People forget that you can locally host some of the early models quantized to 4 with reasonable inference with a 4080 and 64gb of ram. There are daily tools being released that are a simple click and run, without much hassle other than downloading the model and you're off and running.

Yes there is mad dash by Google, Oracle, Microsoft, Meta, and China not to cede their position to each other - it actually isn't about who will buy or pay for the service its more of a Business Strategic position to obtain critical mass in a new market using their massive reserve of cash. The users right now are insignificant to their goal - they probably aren't even given a second thought.

lelanthran13• 5 months ago

But we’re also running full speed into an ecosystem controlled by 2 or 3 major companies.

We aren't, though. They think we are :-/

The reality is that tokens are the second-lowest value link in the AI value-chain (the lowest-value item being electricity).

These providers are operating low down in the value chain; they are trying to sell a fungible, easy replaceable and (if hardware price trends is any indication) easily self-hostable.

They have no secret sauce, no moat. If they jack up the prices, their users will simply move to the next provider, and repeat ad nauseum as long as VCs want to subsidise in the hope of a landgrab.

PLenz• 5 months ago

Of course they don't like it. CLAW makes the platform fungible and once that happens the magic by which their insane multiples of values exist bursts.

e1ghtSpace• 5 months ago

I used the pay as you go from google with openclaw for about one hour, then checked the next day and it cost me $7. It was the latest flash preview model. I can't justify the cost right now. At least I won't get banned though.

Havoc2• 5 months ago

That is presumably the end game - monthly subscription in a walled garden app while they have your balls in a vice grip and can squeeze however many dollars you’ll bear

I bet Google is thankful that anthropic took one for the team by going first.

Also if it wasn’t for Chinese providers we’d basically already be in triopoly.

Perplexity had a ban wave this weekend too

gmerc2• 5 months ago

Presumably ...? It's the business model. Subsidize until the competition is down to 2, then extract. That's the entire Valley. Which is why the Chinese and Open Source need to be pushed from the market for the whole banana to work

gck113• 5 months ago

Yup. The entire business models of Google (or rather, Gemini), OpenAI and Anthropic stand on open source models not being as good.

They're literally all just a single open source model away from effectively becoming trillion dollar paperweights.

krzat• 5 months ago

You forgot the part where everything you send is used to train your replacement.

kristjansson• 5 months ago

Why is everyone surprised, these subscriptions are basically toys. You pay so much, and you get about that much in inference compute, more if you’re lucky / early.

If you want to real use these things get an API key and pay the true marginal cost of your compute like a grown up.

AISnakeOil• 5 months ago

This is how open source wins

obblekk• 5 months ago

This is the first time in recent memory that software has had high variable costs so the surprise at these rules is understandable.

In this case, a the difference in context cache hit rate between openclaw and antigravity.

For example if openclaw starts every message with the current time hh:mm:ss at the top of the context window, followed by the full convo history, it would have a cache hit rate if ~0. Simply moving the updated time to each new message incrementally would increase hit rate to over 90%. Idk if openclaw does this but there’s many many optimizations like this. And worse, thrashing the cache has non linear effects on the server as more and more users’ cached contexts get evicted from cache due to high cardinality. The cost to serve difference could be >10x.

Google is the furthest behind on coding agent adoption and has all the incentives to allow off policy use to grow demand. But it would probably be better to design their own optimized openclaw and serve that for free than let any unoptimized requests in.

martinald2• 5 months ago

It's a fair point, but I think people are thinking too much about 'cost' and 'subsidies' and just the fact that everyone is so compute stretched.

While it's sort of the same thing, I think it's much more a symptom of not enough compute vs some 'dump cheap tokens' on the market strategy.

One related thought I had was that given OpenAI is the only one _not_ doing this of the big3, it probably indicates they have a lot more spare compute.

It doesn't make sense to me that given the absolutely brutal competition any of these companies would block use of 3rd party apps unless they had to. They clearly have enough cash, so I don't think it's about money - I think it's that an indicator that Google and Anthropic are really struggling with keeping up with demand. Given Anthropics reliability issues last week this does not surprise me.

rustyhancock2• 5 months ago

I agree with all this.

I would add though that many are also being caught up in antispam efforts.

I.e. that for every legimate OpenClaw user doing something trivial with their account misusing the sub. There is probably 10x using it to send spam emails and spam comments.

I suspect from googles perspective some of these people are just a rounding error.

That said I use API where I should and the sub in the first party apps. Perhaps I'm too much of a goody two shoes but AI already feels such an overwhelming value prop for me I don't care.

That said I think you're right in that money matters here but I think the subs as they intend people to use them is hugely profitable i.e. the people doing 10 chats per work day and a few in the evening but paying £20 per month.

easton• 5 months ago

One related thought I had was that given OpenAI is the only one _not_ doing this of the big3, it probably indicates they have a lot more spare compute.

Or, pessimistically, it could indicate they’re burning cash hoping the subsidized access will eventually result in someone giving them a product idea they can build and resell at a profit.

If they let *claw (or third party coding agents, or whatever) run for six more months and in those months figure out how to sell a safe substitute and then cut off access, maybe it will have been worth it.

goodmythical• 5 months ago

This is the first time in recent memory that software has had high variable costs

Running software has always had a variable cost.

Why should I be surprised if [cloud provider] were upset that I were running a thousand free tier servers? Or utilizing any paid plan at all to somehow effect utilizations far exceeding the clearly documented limitations of my plan?

Using the torrent network protocol on a VPN that doesn't support it, or fork bombing an email server, or using that one popular free video hosting service to host nigh unlimitted arbritrary data, or hosting content that is illegal to the server operator regardless of its legality to me, etc, etc, etc

It's all the same thing: TOS violation.

No one is being forced to use these products without reading and signing the terms of service. In this particular instance, you can even use the free version of the provided service to analyze the terms of service for the paid plan if you were really so lazy.

I really am genuinely confounded as to why people are so regularly surprised that they can't just do whatever they please with proprietary solutions. Like "oh what do you mean I can't lie about the date of my injury in order to get it covered by insurance?".

It's almost like people just assume that everything ever works exactly as they would deam it to (in their benefit), rather than the much more sane assumption that every company is going to be naturally inclined to cater to their own benefit before the users'.

hansonkd• 5 months ago

A lot of people running OpenClaw just have it generated and burning tokens for no reason. They just know more tokens = doing stuff so want to spend as many tokens as possible.

danpalmer4• 5 months ago

If you go to an all you can eat buffet, ignore the plates they give you, and start filling up your own takeaway boxes with days worth of food, you'd expect to be kicked out.

No one would think this is unreasonable. You're not paying for unlimited food forever, you're paying for all you can eat in the restaurant right there.

josephcsible3• 5 months ago

No, if you did that, they'd start by saying "hey, stop that", not jump immediately to "you're banned from every Golden Corral location for the rest of your life".

gck113• 5 months ago

I'm confused by this repeat analogy here. There's 0 offerings with all you can eat type of deal. No AI service is offering that.

They all have amounts defined in their service agreements of how much you can eat and in what intervals.

danpalmer4• 5 months ago

Exactly. And yet that's what some people are doing, they're sneaking in their takeaway containers and getting stroppy at being banned.

BoorishBears4• 5 months ago

I'm confused why the presence (or lack of) a limit is relevant to the pretty simple analogy...

A buffet is saying "pay $X to eat food one plate at a time [up to 100 lbs of food]", and you show up and start shoveling the food into your bag. Does not really matter if we remove the 100lbs part.

Could you technically eat the same amount of food one plate a time? Sure. But if everyone does this, $X needs to be significantly more: even for the people who eat one plate at a time.

You could also argue they're playing a mean trick and deceiving people because technically someone could eat the same amount of food 1 plate at a time...

But they priced $X based on how much the average person can eat, not how much food they can carry in their arms. If the limits are so high that people don't leave hungry eating 1 plate at a time, it still seems like a fair deal.

I'm not exactly the type to jump for joy at siding with a corporation, but I really don't get why people are in a hurry to ruin a good thing.

lelanthran13• 5 months ago

They all have amounts defined in their service agreements of how much you can eat and in what intervals.

Seems like you're okay with honoring the terms of service, then? Because the client you can use is also in the terms of service.

ajsnigrutin• 5 months ago

But it's not takeout boxes, it's not taking stuff home, not even sharing... it's just bringing your own spoon with which you can eat faster.

_pdp_2• 5 months ago

While the frustration is understandable I don't see any difference between this and Netflix not allowing you to use your Netflix subscription in Amazon Prime federated video hub or something of that sort.

At the end of the day we know that these tools are massively subsidised and they do not reflect the real cost of usage. It is a fair-use model at best and the goal is to capture as market share as possible.

I am a no defender of Google and I've been burned many times by Google as well but I kind of get it?

That being said, you don't really need to use your gemini subscription in openclaw. You can use gemini directly the way it was intended and rip the benefits of the subsidised plan.

I developed an open source tool called Pantalk which sits as a background daemon and exposes many of the communication channels you want as a standard CLI which gemini can use directly. All you need is just some SKILL.md files to describe where things are at and you are good to go. You have openclaw without openclaw and still within TOS.

The project is hosted at: https://github.com/pantalk/pantalk

scuff3d2• 5 months ago

I don't understand. Everyone's been saying LLMs are gonna get cheaper and cheaper, to the point where it's almost free to operate. Clearly becoming profitable won't be a problem... so they can't be subsiding that much...

Are you telling me a bunch of people on Twitter and HN are full of shit?

_pdp_2• 5 months ago

They are not totally full of it.

But state of the art models are not free. GLM 5 and Kimi K2.5 are both open-source and they are much better models than the ones we used to pay for a year ago. Now we get them for free. This is certainly having an effect on all model providers which either need to adjust to new market realities or risk to loose market share and we know which thing they are not going to do.

famouswaffles• 5 months ago

Model costs have gone down orders of magnitudes in the last few years, and google would stop something like this no matter how profitable Gemini was or wasn't. It's a blatant misuse of their terms.

LinXitoW2• 5 months ago

No, it's more like Netflix not allowing you to watch on non-Netflix branded devices or browsers. Or banning you for connecting the wrong TV to a valid device.

Or Microsoft banning you from O365 for not using their browser, or the correct monitor, or the correct mouse or.....

BrenBarn• 5 months ago

AI or no AI, every company this big needs to be broken up into tiny pieces.

prescriptivist2• 5 months ago

Assuming these plans are based on Gemini, Google is doing these users a favor, frankly.

ltbarcly3• 5 months ago

I don't think you've used it lately. Gemini 2/2.5 were garbage-tier. The flash level models are absolute trash. 3/3.1 pro are state of the art.

prescriptivist2• 5 months ago

I have. 3 is fine, 3.1 is good. But they are terribly slow. Quality is fine but the the only thing they have going for them is flash pricing. Their response performance sucks.

Ryan5453• 5 months ago

Antigravity gives access to Sonnet and Opus 4.6, I would presume most people are using those models rather than Gemini

gck113• 5 months ago

I don't understand how this can be enforced without ridiculous levels of false positives. I'm truly baffled. The same with Claude Code situation.

gemini-cli, claude-code, codex etc, they ALL have a -p flag or equivalent, which is non-interactive IO interface for their LLM inference.

If I wire my tooling (or openclaw) to use the -p flag (or equivalents), is that allowed?

Okay, maybe they get rid of the -p flag and I have to use an interactive session. I can then just use OS IO tooling to wire OpenClaw with their cli. Is that allowed?

How does sending requests directly to the endpoints that their CLI is communicating with suddenly make their subsidized plans expensive? Is it because now I can actually use my 100% quota? If that's so, does it mean their products are such that their profitability stands on people not using them?

What is even going on?

dev1ycan• 5 months ago

Every subscription's profitability stands on people forgetting to unsubscribe, how is this surprising?

gck113• 5 months ago

They're in the wrong business then. They're selling peak automation software, with the sales pitch of 'have AI do your work while you sleep'.

Are they banning their core offering? Are Ralph' loops also banned for building software? Because I can drain my quota with a simple bash loop faster than any OpenClaw instance.

dmix4• 5 months ago

You must not work in the SaaS business if you think that

hendersoon• 5 months ago

The -p flag should be fine, so long as you don't use their oauth in a third-party tool. Gemini also supports A2A for this sort of thing.

gck113• 5 months ago

But the question is - why is the -p flag fine? It hits the same endpoints with the same OAuth token and same quotas.

Comments section here and on related news from Anthropic seems to be centered around the idea that the reason for these bans is that it burns tokens quickly, while their plans are subsidized. What changes with the -p flag? You're just using cli instead of HTTP.

Are the metrics from their cli more valuable than the treasure trove of prompt data that passes through to them either way that justifies this PR?

merlindru2• 5 months ago

claude -p is allowed as far as I'm aware.

if i understand correctly, they even have a wrapper around it to make it easier to use: the Claude Agent SDK

the thing that's disallowed is pretending you're the claude binary, logging in through OAuth

in other words, if you use some product thats not Claude Code, and your browser opens asking you to "give Claude Code access to your account", you're in hot water

as for how they detect it: they say they use heuristics and usage patterns. if something falls wildly out of the distribution it's a ban.

my take is that the problem is not the means of detection. that's fine and seems to work well. the problem is that its an instant outright ban. they should give you a couple warning emails, then a timeout, etc.

nikcub2• 5 months ago

they say they use heuristics and usage patterns.

cache hit rate alone would stand out

adastra223• 5 months ago

The Claude Agent SDK is explicitly disallowed from subscription use, as of a few days ago.

skeledrew• 5 months ago

Why a couple warnings and timeout? 1 warning that the next incident will lead to a ban should be enough. Treat people like adults, not kids.

akssassin9074• 5 months ago

The heuristic detection approach is fine. The penalty ladder is broken.

Reasonable progression: warning email → quota throttle → AI Pro subscription suspended → Google account suspended.

They skipped to step 4 on a first offense, paid account, no appeal. That's not a terms enforcement system, that's a hostage situation. "Comply or lose your digital life."

The real lesson isn't "don't use OpenClaw." It's: never let one company own your primary identity infrastructure.

gopil• 5 months ago

Is OpenClaw a product though? It's more like a system/framework.

rustyhancock2• 5 months ago

The direct answer is their clients play extra nice with their backend.

Specifically all optimize caching.

The indirect answer is for everyone using third party tools to play about there are 10x using it to spam or malicious use cases hammering their backend far cheaper than if it was by API.

These people are the false positives in this situation, but whether Google or Claude care is unlikely. They're happy to ban you and expect you to sign up for the API.

This has always been a worry when you use a service like Google.

joshribakoff• 5 months ago

There are examples of labs banning these use cases for sure, as well as the presence of terms and conditions allowing them to ban you for merely “competing” with them. If you’re building, it could be worth locking in a contract first.

mannanj4• 5 months ago

I feel like it's about data quality. They want humans using the tools because that data is valuable and helps them improve the product. AI's using their product like OpenClaw makes their training missions harder. And even if you opt-out of training, they are still using your data for non-training purposes (you can't open out of that) and that human data is valuable.

googinsider123• 5 months ago

Haha, no. I can tell you that it is so obvious and there is basically no false positives. Can’t share more details though.

If it makes you feel any better, some google employees have their personal accounts banned too (only Gemini access, not the whole account) for running opeclaw, and also have a hard time getting their account reinstated.

andersmurphy2• 5 months ago

Its obvious why this us getting blocked open claw will make multiple orders if magnitude more requests. For each open claw user you could support tens of thousands of regular users.

The financial costs would clearly be ruinous.

gverrilla• 5 months ago

I'm sure google employees that were banned can talk to a HUMAN to solve it.

lelanthran13• 5 months ago

I don't understand how this can be enforced without ridiculous levels of false positives.

It's embarrassingly trivial, IMO - compare what antigravity reports for token to what the backend reports for token usage for that user.

sxp• 5 months ago

Ironically, Gemini says that it’s OK to use the Ultraplan for OpenClaw via gemini-cli because the Ultra plan has some API & Cloud credits baked into it. I think $100/mo but I can never figure out how Google billing works. I’ve pasted the response I got when I was asking it about OpenClaw. There is legal precedent for an AI hallucination being used to upload a contract (e.g, an AI customer support for an airline made a false claim and the customer bought a ticket based on that claim) so it will be interesting to see if Google reverts the bans since Gemini hallucinated that OpenClaw was OK:

  This is a critical question because the answer is different for Google vs.   Anthropic, and getting it wrong with Anthropic can actually get your account banned.
  Here is the reality of the situation based on current Terms of Service and recent community reports.
  1. Google (Gemini Ultra + gemini-cli)
  Verdict: Safe (Authorized Feature)
  Google explicitly built the gemini-cli bridge to allow Ultra subscribers to use their plan programmatically. This is not a "hack" or a gray-area wrapper; it is an official feature.
  • Why it's okay: You are authenticating via gcloud or the official CLI login flow. Google tracks this usage against your specific "Agent" quotas (currently ~200 agent requests/day for Ultra users).
  • The Limit: As long as you are using the official gemini-cli as the bridge, you are compliant.
  • The Risk: If you use a different unofficial script that scrapes the gemini.google.com web interface (simulating a browser) rather than using the official CLI, you risk a ban for "scraping." But since you are using gemini-cli, you are in the clear.

aydyn• 5 months ago

Claude says it was safe too. Bare minimum the flagship models of these companies should understand their own ToS. Sheesh.

j16sdiz• 5 months ago

afaict, OpenClaw use gemini-cli for oauth, then bypassing gemini-cli and do the call directly.

TeMPOraL2• 5 months ago

Gemini didn't hallucinate anything. You just failed in basic reading comprehension.

In some sense, hallucinations as a problem have been solved already - their rate of occurrence seems much lower than that of people failing to read what is written instead of what they hoped it would be.

helsinkiandrew• 5 months ago

So a Google AI pro/ultra account is intended to be used from their cli or tools (like their open-gravity agent front end).

Their API usage isn't included in these plans, although under the hood open-gravity uses the API.

People have been using the API auth credential intended for anti-gravity with open claw, presumably causing a significant amount of use and have been caught.

The Google admin tools and process haven’t quite been able to cope with this situation and people have been overly banned with poor information sent to the them.

I don’t think either OpenAI or Anthropic any API use in their ‘pro’ plans either?

This reminds me of the customers of “unlimited broadband” of yesteryear getting throttled or banned for running Tor servers.

WSSP• 5 months ago

The Google admin tools and process haven’t quite been able to cope with this situation and people have been overly banned with poor information sent to the users.

I can’t recall any success story of Google’s support team or process coping with a consumer’s situation, many have been posted here. this isn’t a new outcome, just a new cause

I do want to understand what’s happening with the $250/mo fees of users caught in this. will it be automatically cancelled at some point?

agentifysh• 5 months ago

so far i've been able to use gemini pro just fine from codex cli using my web session mcp bridge: https://github.com/agentify-sh/desktop

it seems like the main problem with OpenCode and OpenClaw is that they call the API directly bypassing the website

my approach is browser automation, its technically against the ToS too but there's default mechanisms to avoid unintentional mass spam.

I think what pissed off Google and Anthropic was that people were running through multiple accounts from OpenCode and ruined it for everybody else

gmerc2• 5 months ago

It's the old playbook again. They're using massive money to distort the market until the competition is bled dry while also operating the platform and using signal from the platform to target their competitors, classic DMA violation really. This all boils down to Chinese vendors getting banned from the market for "national security reasons" because if not, this all dies in a fire for Google investors. Nothing a gold pixel phone to the right places can't fix

keepamovin• 5 months ago

<Blasts terminal>: Boring conversation anyway.

Rostik312• 5 months ago

Wow, and I was complaining about Anthropic handling their comms.

For almost a trillion-dollar company, this is the worst customer experience I've ever seen. Departments sending poor guy to each other like a hot potato. Huge aura loss.

DANmode3• 5 months ago

Pitting departments against each other isn’t for the consumers!

mayordelmar• 5 months ago

This is bullish! Big props to google for stepping in over 7,000 API keys have been compromised due this openclawd crap.

antdx316• 5 months ago

Account ban?

I just use Gemini 3.1 Pro (High) on Antigravity.

GPT-5.3-Codex is the best on OpenClaw.

Sonnet 4.6 uses 50x more session tokens than GPT-5.3-Codex on OpenClaw.

edandersen• 5 months ago

Google, unlike all their competitors, actually give Cloud API credits to all paying users of AI Pro and AI Ultra [1] - just use those for direct Gemini/Vertex API access instead of trying to hack the OAuth of Google's apps.

[1] https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-...

benatkin• 5 months ago

I think they could object to some uses of OpenClaw for that as well - for instance if someone just used a skill without caring what model it used.

mark_l_watson5• 5 months ago

great point - I am a heavy user of API calls (using an API key) for gemini-3-flash-preview and I find it difficult to spend my free API credits.

TechSquidTV• 5 months ago

I'll admit to knowingly taking advantage of Google's pricing, but I had assumed it was within a gray area. No warning bans are insane.

dmix4• 5 months ago

Google has always done no warning bans

YouTube is also full of huge content creators, people who make Google tons of money, that complain about the Byzantine and opaque rules they have to dance around to maintain their livelihood and fan base

Google fears their giant userbases so they act with zero regard for communication and transparency because of the small chance it’d help the abusers

runevault• 5 months ago

There was a recent gnarly version of this where some anime reactors and at least one animation channel (with something like 1.4 million subs) got demonetized and had to go through a ton of hoops to get a human to fix it.

dboreham• 5 months ago

So there is such a thing as a free lunch! Oh wait...

TOMDM• 5 months ago

People seem to be continuously outraged by these AI subscriptions banning third party use. However, the usage patterns of the intended apps likely differ hugely from those of the third party ones.

For example, basically every first party agent harness aggressively caches the input tokens to optimise inference, something that third party harnesses often disgregard, or are fundamentally incompatible with as they switch agents for subtasks and the like.

To extend this use case though, how much do poeple expect to be able to use the internal API's of the apps they subscribe to?

If I buy an Uber One subscription, am I then justified reverse engineering the gazeteer API from the app and reusing it in other apps I use? What about the speech to text API MS Teams must use for transcribing meetings as part of a business standard subscription?

I think these are obvious and emphatic breaches that no reasonable person would expect to be justified in, maybe miffed if your clever hack gets banned, but being banned would be considered fair play.

I fail to see the distinction.

smashah2• 5 months ago

Yes you are actually. We can assert rights for ourselves and enshrine them into law after which your rhetorical become questionable and redundant.

For example the EU DNA (entirely not enough but in the right direction).

We should have the right to use our accounts as we wish.

It's the right-to-repair applied to software.

Abuse is something else entirely.

nanobuilds2• 5 months ago

So what is a "good-enough" model to use for OpenClaw now that the subscriptions are blocked. Is there an all you can eat subscription model that can be used?

nanobuilds2• 5 months ago

in case someone else is looking for this.. openai-codex/gpt-5.3-codex is working okay for now but eventually i'd like to switch to a self hosted one somewhere.

adithyassekhar3• 5 months ago

Edit: I have misread some of the comments here, he didn't lose access to his whole account and data just the antigravity part. I should've done my due diligence, get out of bed and spent more time thinking instead of emotionally reacting. Guess the rage machine got me as well. Damn. I think this thread might be hijacked by ai bros.

The main point still stands, google is part of a duopoly that runs the world. You can't be a functional member of society without them. They're like a public utility and plays too big of a role in people's life to take decisions based on unknown internal policies. They're long overdue for a government intervention or for splitting up.

deaux• 5 months ago

It's absurd and shameful. If only for the fact of banning individual consumers paying $249/month without warning, completely rendering them unable to use the service they paid for, including through the official app.

Just the 1000th instance of disgusting behavior by US big tech.

hsuduebc22• 5 months ago

This is a serious problem. I think the only durable solution is legislation that requires these companies to provide access to your data, or at least a way to export or transfer it, even after an account ban. Otherwise, if they delete your account for any reason, even for a legitimate policy violation, they can effectively cut you off from information you have built up and stored over years. In Apple’s case, an account lock can even leave a device unusable.

I have read several blog posts from people describing how frustrating it is to have an account locked. Because Google, like many large companies, provides little to no effective support, the only thing that seemed to work was getting a post to trend on Hacker News so that someone inside Google noticed and intervened to resolve it.

gck113• 5 months ago

Google does give you a way to export data partially if your account is banned.

But that's still not enough. I can't easily reconstruct this data in a way that will be usable to me, not without having something like Gemini build a UI for me. Oh wait.

akssassin9074• 5 months ago

Fine, restrict the OpenClaw usage. Fine, cancel the AI Pro subscription. But nuking Gmail, Google Photos, Drive — years of irreplaceable personal data — as punishment for how you routed tokens? That's not enforcement, that's collective punishment.

No bank closes your checking account because you used your debit card at a competitor's ATM.

The offense and the penalty are in completely different weight classes. That's what makes this indefensible regardless of whether the policy itself is legitimate.

avaer• 5 months ago

This is why companies get broken up.

Usually they'll try to hide the monopoly/tying to avoid this. What's interesting is that they don't seem to be trying.

It's not the same thing but it does remind me of [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

echelon• 5 months ago

Google needs to be dismantled. A lot of us on HN have been calling for this for years now.

Can we start saying it in unison to legislators and the press? Please?

If you're in the EU, do your part too.

This company taxes the URL bar. It owns 92% of them and turns trademarks they don't own into forced bidding wars. There's no way to access any brand without paying Google extortion fees.

This company removed AdBlock.

This company controls 50% of mobile - the most important device category and devices we own and pay for - and now they're removing our ability to use them as we please. More taxation, more Google services, every app and search through the Google troll toll. You can't even order from a restaurant anymore without one of these things and Google lords over it.

They own your digital life. They own infrastructure. They own discovery. They own every touch point.

They are too big.

Anthropic and OpenAI are having to pay out the nose for 60% of users to even access them, meanwhile Google sings "lalalala" and forced their AI products onto users at no cost.

Break them up now.

Do it horizontally, not vertically: instead of splitting off Chrome and Search and YouTube, create Google A, Google B, Google C ... Make them split all the same pieces and make them all compete with each other.

That is fair for the consumer. That is fair for competition.

That is the most capitalistic friendly thing to do. Because right now Google is an invasive species in every market destroying the entire competitive ecology.

NewsaHackO5• 5 months ago

Oh now this is the new pivot?

Can you begin to imagine losing access to all your emails, accounts, every photo you ever took? Because what they didn't like how you used one unrelated product tied to your account?

What are you talking about? He didn't lose access to Google, in fact, he is using his Google account to make the post. He lost access to the service they are claiming that he is misusing.

HardCodedBias• 5 months ago

If this had happened it would be scandalous. Unreal, really.

Luckily, it sounds like reality was his Gemini account was banned. Much more reasonable.

adithyassekhar3• 5 months ago

I based my comment from one other comment posted here. Should've done some basic thinking. Clarified in my original comment.

xg15• 5 months ago

This has been happening in other situations though.

wanderingmind• 5 months ago

Best way to deal with this is take them to small claims court. If enough people do this, They have to send representations that will cost them enough to stop such nonsense.

ninjagoo2• 5 months ago

They have binding arbitration clauses in their Terms of "Service". I don't know if you can actually take them to small claims court.

They got rid of their "Don't be evil" motto for a reason, after all.

koalaman• 5 months ago

"You can't be a functional member of society without them."

could you elaborate on why this is true? I can't think of any.

cmrdporcupine• 5 months ago

Meanwhile it's day 3? 4? since Gemini 3.1 was announced with a claim that Gemini CLI users would have access to it, but AI Pro subscribers still don't see it, and there's been no clarification from Google about what is going on, and why:

https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/19532

They are not serious. I only keep the "AI Pro" sub because it comes with a couple terabytes of Drive storage for the family.

Anyways, Google, nobody wants to use your bad VSCode fork. I want to use my own tools, and use your model where it makes sense as part of my own workflow.

sergiotapia• 5 months ago

Does anyone know if this ban means you lose your email/pixel/youtube/google ads/google gtm stuff?

This basically makes it a deal breaker to use google ai stuff because you can be royally fucked by one ban.

bryan_w• 5 months ago

Oof. Google definitely fired too many people if this is how they are handling account violations for people paying them multiple hundreds of dollars a month.

Normally there would be a normal, well adjusted person in the room to remind them that "zero tolerance" policies for situations that can happen by mistake is silly

opengrass• 5 months ago

The only suckers here are those paying $249 a month to Google instead of used GPU sellers.

throwaway13337• 5 months ago

These companies are engaged in a sort of AI dumping. Cheap inference below cost.

Price out competitors. Abuse your newfound dominance.

It's the big tech playbook.

I don't think it's going to work this time.

Tools like OpenClaw are an existential threat precisely because it allows the user control over their experience. The value in it cannot be captured by a monopoly.

LLMs don't seem to be a very good moat. At the same time, the software moat is eroding due to those same LLMs.

Telecom tech killed telecom dominance.

With some luck, Google tech will kill Google dominance.

gck113• 5 months ago

Is that... Why Google released Antigravity, an IDE, no less, when even my non-tech dentist is using claude code in cli? And why Anthropic is pushing their desktop apps, skills, and all these integrations their models can build in a day?

Are they betting on their software, not their LLM deciding if they survive or not if competitive open source model is dropped? Oh boy, the market is going to have some fun times when realization hits.

hsaliak• 5 months ago

Google's Pro service (no idea about ultra and I have no intention to find out) is riddled with 429s. They have generous quotas for sure, but they really give you very low priority. For example, I still dont have access to Gemini 3.1 from that endpoint. It's completely uncharacteristic of Google.

I analyzed 6k HTTP requests on the Pro account, 23% of those were hit with 429s. (Though not from Gemini-CLI, but from my own agent using code assist). The gemini-cli has a default retry backoff of 5s. That's verifiable in code, and it's a lot.

I dont touch the anti-gravity endpoint, unlike code-assist, it's clear that they are subsidizing that for user acquisition on that tool. So perhaps it's ok for them to ban users form it.

I like their models, but they also degrade. It's quite easy to see when the models are 'smart' and capacity is available, and when they are 'stupid'. They likely clamp thinking when they are capacity strapped.

Yes the models are smart, but you really cant "build things" despite the marketing if you actively beat back your users for trying. I spent a decade at Google, and it's sad to see how they are executing here, despite having solid models in gemini-3-flash and gemini-3.1

gck113• 5 months ago

Yes the models are smart, but you really cant "build things" despite the marketing if you actively beat back your users for trying

I think this is the most important takeaway from this thread and at some point, this will end up biting Google and Anthropic back.

OpenAI seems to have realized this and is actively trying to do the opposite. They welcomed OpenCode the same day Anthropic banned them, X is full of tweets of people saying codex $20 plan is more generous than Anthropic's $200 etc.

If you told me this story a year ago without naming companies, I would tell you it's OpenAI banning people and Google burning cash to win the race.

And it's not like their models are winning any awards in the community either.

mannanj4• 5 months ago

It's unfortunate though that they lie and deceive by having a name called "Open"AI when they are in fact "Closed". And the whole non-profit to profit and Microsoft deals are just untrustable and unethical.

They also actively employ dark strategies in cooperation with CIA and who knows when they will pull the rug under you again.

Do you really trust a foundational rotten group of people who avoid accountability?

tom_m2• 5 months ago

You can build plenty with Google ai pro plan and Antigravity. Yea there's some limits that should be even higher, but you can still build stuff.

lukeschlather3• 5 months ago

My impression is there's a definite shortage of GPUs, and if OpenAI is more reliable it's because they have fewer customers relative to the number of GPUs they have. I don't think Google is handing out 429s because they are worried about overspending; I think it's because they literally cannot serve the requests.

tempaccount4202• 5 months ago

I'm guessing at least 50% of the "users" of Antigravity are actually OpenCode users exploiting the oauth and endpoint. Must be infuriating to them if they're subsidizing it.

The OpenCode plugin (8.7k stars btw!) even advertises "Multi-account support — add multiple Google accounts, auto-rotates when rate-limited"[1]

[1] https://github.com/NoeFabris/opencode-antigravity-auth/blob/...

oofbey2• 5 months ago

I’ve often suspected these models of getting dumber when the service is under high load. But I’ve never seen actually measured results or proof. Anybody know of real published data here?

forgotTheLast• 5 months ago

Not exactly what you're looking for but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46810282

transcriptase• 5 months ago

ChatGPT was brutal for it a couple years ago. You could tell when it would go into “lazy mode” during peak usage periods.

Suddenly instead of writing the code you asked for it would give some generic bullet points telling you to find a library to do what you asked for and read the documentation.

ayewo• 5 months ago

Here's a recent comment [1] by an OpenAI engineer confirming that they do in fact make such trade offs between intelligence and efficiency.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46909905

harshitaneja• 5 months ago

Just adding for context that I use Gemini Ultra and across all models from Gemini 3.1 Pro to Claude Opus 4.6, I have never hit 429s as well as hitting model quota limits is incredibly rare and only happens if I am trying to run 3 projects at once. While not the biggest agentic coding fan, I have been toying with them and have been running it for at least 7-8 hours a day if not longer.

ingatorp2• 5 months ago

I've stopped using Gemini models altogether because of this. I'm using Claude Code with MiniMax M2.5 for a while now and i couldn't be happier. I haven't noticed any drop in output quality and the biggest advantage is that even the $10 is pretty generous. I haven't been hit with rate limit, not even one time. And i'm pretty heavy user. I tried also GLM 5.0 but i hit rate limit there pretty early on.

AJRF• 5 months ago

One thing with GLM 5 is they seem to do this weird thing where when your account is just opened it limits you really heavy, then this gets lifted later.

I had buyers remorse when the first hour or two I kept getting rate limited on GLM5, but since then i've not had a single rate limit and I am using it very heavily.

sva_4• 5 months ago

It is indeed somewhat sad/ridiculous to see that my GH Copilot Pro grants me access to Gemini 3.1, but my Google AI Pro does not

AloysB• 5 months ago

Yann Lecun warned that closed sourced models are the only true danger we are facing with LLMs (answering a question about "Will AI turn into Terminator" type of question).

He was right.

castalian• 5 months ago

It makes some sense. Some of the skills are malware, and google absolutely has the power to detect it by inspecting LLM I/O. If Google suspects that google account credentials have been compromised (via connecting to a malicious "integration"), it is rational to freeze the account (as opposed to letting the threat actors ride with the credentials they've stolen)

josephcsible3• 5 months ago

we are unable to reverse the suspension

I hate when companies say "unable" when they mean "unwilling". Google's statement is a lie because it's neither impossible nor illegal for them to change or rescind their policy, or give users an exception to it.

tom_m2• 5 months ago

Meh, that's ok. Not using openclaw anyway. Doesn't sound useful to be frank.

plastic_bag• 5 months ago

I'd rather use Chinese models like Kimi K2.5 or Minimax M2.5 for personal agents at this point. They are almost as smart but 10x cheaper and their attitude towards subscribers is use where you want.

therobots927• 5 months ago

And the AI price shock begins…

stevefan1999• 5 months ago

At this point, running Chinese model like GLM-5 or Kimi K2 would be far more safer than risking off your LLM subscriptions. Quite the irony that our AI techno-feudal corpo overlords doesn't want to see their LLM take off with curious and useful open source ideas. Just like Microsoft, they deliberately buried it for some reason.

Oh, maybe not, they did it in the name of "terms of service abuse" and "risk assessment".

Thus it would be far better if we can just have SOTA open weight model to run OpenClaw/Clawdbot/Molt at least we are under control. And as you see the two Chinese models I mentioned are indeed open weight, albeit taking atrocious amount of resource to really self host, and you probably need to have abliterations to remove their political guardrails.

Sigh. We can't have great things with those big tech corpos and CCP politics. Big question: Why has this world gone to shit lately.

nprateem• 5 months ago

LOL. This entire thread basically reads why you should never build dev tools. It's difficult to find a more entitled, cheapskate bunch of people who are completely clueless about business.

TIL it's "unfair" to sell a product for a particular purpose and offer subsidised rates to build a customer base. Different planet.

tabs_or_spaces• 5 months ago

So the timeline is basically

* User uses Google oauth to integrate their open claw

* user gets banned from using Google AI services with no warning

* user still gets charged

If you go backwards, getting charged for services you can't access is rough. I feel sorry for those who are deeply integrated into Google services or getting banned on their main accounts. It's not a great situation.

Also, getting banned without warning is rough as well. I wonder if the situation will be different for business accounts as opposed what seems like personal accounts?

The ban itself seems fair though, google is allowed to restrict usage of their services. Even though it's probably not developer friendly, it's within their rights to do so.

I guess there's some level of post mortem to do on the openclaw side too.

* Why did openclaw allow Google anti gravity logins?

* The plugin is literally called "google-antigravity-auth", why didn't that give the signal to the maintainers?

* Why don't the maintainers, for an integration project, do due diligence checks on the terms of service of everything you're integrating with?

anon848736283• 5 months ago

I don't understand step 1. OAuth client applications have to be registered in GCP, right? They have to request specific scopes for specific APIs, and there is a review process before they can be used by the public. Did none of that happen for the Open Claw client? How is it the users' fault for clicking a "Sign in with Google" button? And if there was a mistake, why not ban the whole client?

I could see a problem with logging into Antigravity then exfiltrating the tokens to use somewhere else... But that doesn't sound like what happened. (And then how would they know?)

I haven't used Open Claw, so what else am missing to make this make sense?

integralpilot• 5 months ago

To my understanding, OpenClaw pretends to be Antigravity by using the Antigravity OAuth client ID (and doesn't have its own), and then the takes the token Google returns to instead use with OpenClaw.

When I first tried OpenClaw and chose Google Sign-In, I noticed the window appeared saying "Sign into Google Antigravity" with a Google official mark, and a warning it shouldn't be used to sign into anything besides official Google apps. I closed it immediately and uninstalled OpenClaw as this was suspicious to me, and it was a relatively new project then.

It amazes me that the maintainer(s) allowed something like this...

axus• 5 months ago

It doesn't seem fair at all; though I'm glad to see it's not as bad as I feared (yet?).

Hoping for some transparency, I left a single, polite comment asking for clarification on why the update was removed. Surprisingly, my forum account was banned shortly after posting that question.

Aurornis4• 5 months ago

* Why did openclaw allow Google anti gravity logins?

OpenClaw went from virtually unheard of to a sensation in a couple weeks. There was intense commit activity and the main author bragged about not even reading the code himself. It was all heavily AI driven and moving at an extreme rate. Everyone was competing to get their commits in because they wanted to be a part of it.

The entire project was a fast and furious experiment. Nobody was stopping to think if something was a good idea or not when someone published a plugin for using this endpoint. People just thought “cool!” and installed it.

lucianbr2• 5 months ago

That's how AI is supposed to be used, no? That's what the providers advertise - it increases development speed, a lot, it replaces devs and so on.

But I guess it's only ok when you work on regular joe facing projects, where the consequences of bugs are on powerless users. If the consequences are on Google, well, that's not acceptable now is it?

shevy-java2• 5 months ago

Also, getting banned without warning is rough as well.

Agreed. The lesson is: do not become dependent on Google. Ever.

(Unfortunately I still use youtube and a chromium-based browser. Long-term I hope to find alternatives to both problems. Google search I no longer need because Google already ruined it a few years ago; the quality now is just horrible. I can not find anything useful with it anymore.)

vincston• 5 months ago

What google search alternative have you found? Im trying out ecosia, duckduckgo and brave search, but i find their search results even worse, so in the second query i tend to bang to google..

Chaosvex2• 5 months ago

Literally just use Firefox.

fmbb• 5 months ago

1. Did a human really knowingly decide to allow that?

2. Did a human create the plugin?

3. Are the maintainers human?

By human I mean an animal that is intelligent enough to understand the agreements and what code they are writing.

animuchan• 5 months ago

Most people aren't human then, sad.

renegat0x0• 5 months ago

I think as a society we miss some kind of 'laws', or 'rules' around accounts and banning.

I feel that sometimes corporations have all 3 montesquieu powers. Google can define eulas, decide if you should be punished, and apply a ban.

Can a shop decide who to serve? I may be wrong, but big tech should not be able to 'just close' accounts, or demonetize accounts on their whim.

bootsmann• 5 months ago

Have you seen the code of OpenClaw? It would not surprise me if there is a mistake in there somewhere that causes the bot to hammer google auth for the refresh token in a very identifiable manner because noone in that repo is bothering to look at the code before merging. Moved fast, broke things.

RobotToaster2• 5 months ago

Why did openclaw allow Google anti gravity logins?

There's a good chance the plugin was written by gemini, why did it allow that?

hnburnsy• 5 months ago

Is this how tech companies operate now...

1) Stand up a service 2) ??? 3) Profit

??? - worry about any substantial support later

cube006• 5 months ago

worry about any substantial support later

What later? You still can't get support from Google beyond their "community forum" with their condescending volunteer "diamond product experts" who have no power to help with anything account related.

wewewedxfgdf• 5 months ago

Well OpenClaw is an OpenAI product now, right?

Effectively.

prdonahue• 5 months ago

Isn't this sort of repeated communication gaffe why they hired @OfficialLoganK?

lyton• 5 months ago

Page archive: https://archive.ph/YWmbx

stevevuny• 5 months ago

For fuck sake, OpenClaw is destroying everything. Shitty users of OpenClaw will force the LLM providers to limit quotas for legitimate users. OpenClaw should die.

azerath2• 5 months ago

How

azerath2• 5 months ago

How!!!

bandrami• 5 months ago

This kind of crap is exactly what I don't want to spend energy worrying about, so I'll wait a few months for the models I can host to catch up.

8cvor6j844qw_d62• 5 months ago

Well, better start segregating for Google accounts.

Don't want to risk loosing access to your Google Photos, Drives, Gmail, etc.

Although at a brief read, it seems the user still have access to other Google services.

8cvor6j844qw_d62• 5 months ago

Well, better start separating out your Google accounts.

Don't want to risk losing access to your Google Photos, Drive, Gmail, etc.

Although from a brief read, it seems the user still has access to other Google services.

erashu212• 5 months ago

Everyone's debating whether Google's TOS is fair.

The real issue is that we're building entire development workflows on subsidized inference that was never priced to be used this way.

OpenClaw burns tokens at a rate these $200/month plans were never designed for.

The fix isn't nicer ban policies, it's either honest API pricing or local models good enough for the job.

The 0.5B-3B parameter range is already surprisingly capable for code analysis tasks.

That's where this is heading whether Google likes it or not.

ifyouknewone• 5 months ago

3.1 has made running the API so cheap that this doesn't really matter.

Who in their right might thinks it's a good idea to use something they pay a NAMED SUBCRIPTION FOR as a secondary engine in another tool?

Like, it's hilarious some of you guys think it's OC's fault for this.

It's open source software, with extensive documentation that anything you do with it being at your own risk.

It's no one's fault but the people plugging their oauth into this thing like complete MORONS lol

zb1plus• 5 months ago

This is such a braindead move. Western AI companies short-term greed will just let Chinese companies win. If I were google, I'd just throttle or release a heavily cached version of their API for OpenClaw and automatically detect and direct openclaw usage to this model. Personally, Anthropic and Google's recent moves are just making me go all-in on self-hosted AI.

Palmik• 5 months ago

Who here reads the full terms of service of every Google product they use? The fact that they disabled the whole Google account without warning is damning.

They could have easily just blocked the Gemini / Antigravity use and and/or sent a "final warning" kind of email beforehand.

user7878• 5 months ago

I believe google might be coming up with similar offering hence this is first step to restrict user to use rival products.

shevy-java2• 5 months ago

Every day Google shows its true evil nature. So here clearly they want to offset competitors. That's the true agenda. We saw this when Google crippled ublock origin and then claimed the extension is "harmful", merely because it threatens Google's greed-income via ads.

ingatorp2• 5 months ago

It was already pretty restricted due to ludicrous rate limiting. I tried it just for fun with my Pro account and it was unusable. It couldn't do tasks properly without hitting rate limit, every other prompt.

neop1x2• 5 months ago

From the start, I didn't understand why people pay so much for those subscriptions. Often, there are no clearly stated quotas, limits, or SLAs. For example, OpenAI states that requests are "limited" for the basic plan and "extended" for more expensive plans. It's such a joke.

I've been a pay-as-you-go API user from the beginning, carefully managing my context and usage while also leveraging cheaper, open alternatives to those overpriced "SOTA" models. I'm paying ~6 USD a month and I'm using it quite a lot.

oger2• 5 months ago

Both Google and Anthropic are choosing the wrong route here. While I see the formal aspect of abusing an OAuth token and burning through subsidized tokens, this only creates an internal accounting problem in the short term.

Meanwhile the rising popularity of Claws creates a yet untapped new market segment where users spend significant tokens.

A „soft“ migration of users by explaining to them how the API works, how to pay and how to change from OAuth would be way smarter.

The way this plays out right now is that current Claws users are massively penalized by being suspended indefinitely and new users will think twice. And we can expect a solid PR disaster / Streisand effect for the „poor“ model providers like OpenAI or Anthropic.

Commercially choosing the soft route by warning and throttling will be way smarter and possibly generate more long term revenue

jaikant• 5 months ago

We are in 2026, AI is all around, and we still need to accept Google doing this?

bossyTeacher• 5 months ago

See? This is what a monopoly player flexing looks like. For the people putting all their eggs in a single basket. Can we please stop supporting centralised services? It only gets worse from here.

KayL• 5 months ago

one of my account is banned without any reason. I don't even use OpenClaw.

xnx3• 5 months ago

Additional information from Google employee https://x.com/_mohansolo/status/2025766889205739899 :

"We’ve been seeing a massive increase in malicious usage of the Anitgravity backend that has tremendously degraded the quality of service for our users. We needed to find a path to quickly shut off access to these users that are not using the product as intended. We understand that a subset of these users were not aware that this was against our ToS and will get a path for them to come back on but we have limited capacity and want to be fair to our actual users."

oger2• 5 months ago

While I see the point of limited capacity, it also shows that Google did not plan for rate limiting / throttling of high usage customers. This is ALWAYS the problem with flatrate pricing models. 2% of your customers burn 80+% of your capacity. Did see that in former times with DSL, not too long ago with mobile and now with AI subscriptions. If you want to provide a "good" service for all customers better implement (and not only write in your T&Cs) a fair usage model which (fairly) penalises heavy users.

Good on them that they want to provide a way to bring back customers on board that were burned / surprised by their move.

BUT: The industry is missing a significant long term revenue opportunity here. There obviously is latent demand and Claws have a great product market fit. Why on earth would you deactivate customers that show high usage? Inform them that you have another product (API keys) for them and maybe threaten with throttling. But don't throw them overboard! Find a solution that makes commercial sense for both sides (security from API bill shock for the customer / predictable token usage for the provider).

What we're seeing right now is the complete opposite. Ban customers that might even rely on their account. Feels like the accountants have won this round - but did not expect the PR backlash and possible Streisand effect...

lm28469• 5 months ago

Google did not plan for rate limiting / throttling of high usage customers

Antigravity has very low daily and weekly quotas unless you pay for their most expensive plan, so it means these people drop $200+ a month to run these bots, insanity

embedding-shape2• 5 months ago

Good on them that they want to provide a way to bring back customers on board that were burned / surprised by their move.

Are they though? Another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47116205) seems to indicate these people are all indefinitely suspended with no path to unsuspend them:

[...] I must be transparent and inform you that, in accordance with Google’s policy, this situation falls under a zero tolerance policy, and we are unable to reverse the suspension. [...]

sva_4• 5 months ago

it also shows that Google did not plan for rate limiting / throttling of high usage customers.

There is a (pretty generous and imo reasonable) request quota that reset every 24h

zarzavat2• 5 months ago

Yeah this is a massive fuckup on Google's part and they are taking it out on their customers as per usual.

It's not hard to define a quota system and enforce it. If the quota is too high then reduce the quota. If people are abusing the quota with automated requests then detect that and rate limit those users.

If I'm paying $200+ a month I should be able to saturate Google with requests. It's up to Google to enforce their policies via backpressure so that they don't get overloaded.

Then again this is the same company that suspended people's gmail because they sent too many emotes in YouTube chat. Sadge.

olyjohn• 5 months ago

A fair usage model isn't some handwavey bullshit throttled quota buried in the ToS and marketed as "Unlimited." Its applying a realistic usage quota equally to everybody in the same payment tier that is spelled out right up front so that people know exactly what to expect.

The whole concept of service "abusers" is made up bullshit by companies that over promise, over sell and under deliver.

KronisLV• 5 months ago

We understand that a subset of these users were not aware that this was against our ToS and will get a path for them to come back on but we have limited capacity and want to be fair to our actual users.

It feels like a good default for this would be something similar to video game bans: where you get a "vacation" from the service with a clear reason for why that is, but can return to using it later. Given how much people depend on cloud services, permanent bans for what could be honest mistakes or not knowing stuff would be insane.

leetrout• 5 months ago

I posted an "Ask HN" around this a while back. I think we will see a lot more of it and we will be hurting legitimate users. I like your temp ban idea but I doubt they would give reasons why.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40784126

DaedalusII• 5 months ago

yes. i am not using google ai services because i am afraid i might accidentally get permanently banned

ljm2• 5 months ago

Getting your Google Workspace account nuked because an employee hooked their company Gemini account to OpenClaw would certainly be a novel business risk.

qingcharles• 5 months ago

I wish all the social media services would implement some sort of "vacation" bans instead of outright perma-banning you, when more oft-than-not the ban is a mistake caused by AI. I'd be less mad about some arbitrary nonsense ban if it was only a week.

cube006• 5 months ago

will get a path for them to come back on

That's not what support has been telling their $250 a month customers.

we are unable to reverse the suspension [1]

I get the need to move fast to stabilise the service but similar to an outage it doesn't take much to put a banner on the support page to let customers know bans are temporary until they can come up with a better way of educating customers. Further more it doesn't much to instruct ban appeal teams to tell customers all bans are under review no matter what the reason is to buy them time to separate Claw bans from legitimate abuse bans that need to be upheld.

The fact that users are paying $250 for a service they can't use for at least the last 11 days kills any sympathy I had that Google needed "quickly shut off access", it's like they just sat on their hands until the social media storm hit flash-point.

After 11 days there still isn't even an official statement, just a panicked tweet from a dev likely also getting hammered on socials, goodness knows how long before accounts are restored and credits issued.

Even the original Google employee in the forum thread just ghosted everyone there after the initial "we're looking into it".

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47116205

PunchTornado• 5 months ago

come on, using a monthly paid subscription to obtain auth tokens to use claws bots is quite obviously agains T&C. you need to pay api prices for that. I am sure 100% of those knew they were doing something wrong but proceeded anyway.

JKCalhoun2• 5 months ago

My fascination with local LLMs has waxed and waned over the past year or so. And then something like this comes along and it waxes again mightily. ;-)

Havoc2• 5 months ago

It's a bit leftfield for sure, but "malicious"?

FloorEgg• 5 months ago

I wonder if this was causing the increase in the number of 429 errors I've been getting from Gemini on vertex.

hgo• 5 months ago

If I was an investor in an AI provider I would be quite worried.

1) Switching between LLM API:s is incredibly easy if you are not concerned with differences in personality. As the models get better, it is less important to pick the best one.

2) The products built to bundle the API with a user experience are difficult to build on a level that outclasses open source alternatives.

3) Building an understanding of the user to increase the product value over time and create stickiness is effective, but imho less effective over time as time passes and the user changes. For example, I suspect that these adaptations have a hard time to unlearn things that are no longer true. Learning about the user opaquely is less useful to the user and doing it overtly makes it easier to take the learnings and go. (Besides, it is probably not legal under the GDPR to not let the user export the learnings and take them to another provider.)

Taken together, the moat becomes quite shallow. I see why they aggressively ban any tools demonstrating when open alternatives are in fact better than their own walled gardens.

edit: readability.

Aissen• 5 months ago

It would be fun if Google lost its months of edge in the LLM value race because it alienated early adopters paying $250/month by using a 0-strike system with no customer support.

sva_4• 5 months ago

Honestly, I think it was probably a few users abusing the system like crazy. I've been building with Gemini CLI the past few days and had an increasing amount of issues getting a request through.

The GH issue trackers were full of people bitching and moaning about it. I think it might be a worse thing to alienate your users who use your product in the intended way - through Google's tooling.

But I agree the 0 strike rule seems really excessive.

It is also a possible scenario that a single individual sets up 10+ AI Pro subscriptions to blast through tokens like crazy - not sure how the economics of the daily allowances compare to the API pricing here.

lelanthran13• 5 months ago

Honestly, I think it was probably a few users abusing the system like crazy.

It's not unusual that 10% of users use up 80% of the capacity; first saw this when home internet started getting ubiquitous.

By dropping the problematic 10%, the remaining 90% are:

a. Much happier, and

b. Much more profitable for the provider.

Resulting in a sustainable service for those who don't abuse the hell out o the ToS/FUP.

traveler01• 5 months ago

At this point im reaching the conclusion that Google hates winning.

NietTim• 5 months ago

TOS is TOS and if there is one company not to mess with it's Google because they don't give 2 shits about you. Going straight to a ban with 0 warning and 0 appeal possibility is exactly why I'll never use googles AI chat/coding products, it's just not worth the risk getting banned and losing access to other google services.

TrackerFF2• 5 months ago

I was going to ask the other day, how long until people start getting banned left and right from the big services, after they start using / integrating openclaw? Seems like the other big issues, other than the security aspects. And knowing how kafkaesque it is to deal with companies like google, I don't hope the claw practitioners are too integrated with products from companies like google.

FrozenSynapse• 5 months ago

legit ban, violating tos, using antigravity tokens for open claw token burning machine

Kim_Bruning• 5 months ago

Clearly the demand for special claw plans is right there. (eg Kimi.com already has plans with a one-click claw install included. I thought one or two others too)

BrainBuzzer• 5 months ago

I have never let openclaw touch my Google Account. I have used it only a few times using OpenCode and still my account was banned for violating ToS. Took me a while to figure it out because antigravity never shows you the specific error that occurred, just a simple "Something went wrong". They really should be more transparent about this, at least anthropic makes it clear upfront.

varispeed• 5 months ago

Why they can't rate limit or do some other sensible resource management? Too hard?

alainrk• 5 months ago

I can confirm, happened to me a few days ago

bob1029• 5 months ago

I'm struggling with the economics. It comes off as performative bullshit to me. I thought we were buying entire Apple machines to run our "claws". But, we are simultaneously so poor that we have to smuggle tokens?

karlkloss• 5 months ago

An AI company restricting the access of AIs to their AI.

Exactly my kind of humor.

vdruts• 5 months ago

That's BS

wodenokoto• 5 months ago

Why can third party application log on with OAuth if it is not allowed? Shouldn't it be really straightforward for google to not allow the OAuth when the requesting app is not a google app?

saalweachter4• 5 months ago

So purely from a hacker perspective, I'm amused at the whining.

Like, a corporation had a weakness you could exploit to get free/cheap thing. Fair game.

Then someone shares the exploit with a bunch of script kiddies, they exploit it to the Nth degree, and the company immediately notices and shuts everyone down.

Like, my dudes, what did you think was going to happen?

You treasure these little tricks, use them cautiously, and only share them sparingly. They can last for years if you carefully fly under the radar, before they're fixed by accident when another system is changed. THEN you share tales of your exploits for fame and internet points.

And instead, you integrate your exploit into hip new thing, share it at scale, write blog posts and short form video content about it, basically launch a DDoS against the service you're exploiting, and then are shocked when the exploit gets patched and whine about your free thing getting taken away?

Like, what did you expect was going to happen?

newalexandria• 5 months ago

literally this is why we can't have nice things.

miroljub• 5 months ago

So purely from a hacker perspective, I'm amused at the whining.
Like, a corporation had a weakness you could exploit to get free/cheap thing. Fair game.

From a pure hacker perspective, I'm surprised there are people calling a legitimate usage a "weakness you could exploit"?

What weakness? What exploit? People have been using it in a way that was technically possible. And they paid for it, many purchased the product specifically because of it.

Then Google unilaterally changed the TOS of a product people already purchased and started pulling the rug. And again, there are people who call themselves hackers who approve of that? Even worse, they call people calling out Google for their monopolistic behavior whining.

novaleaf• 5 months ago

Arn't they yoinking an OAuth token for replay in the Claw app?

If so, I don't think anybody who knows how auth works could feign complete innocence.

rolymath• 5 months ago

Google changed the ToS to disallow this usage? I'm pretty sure it was disallowed from the beginning

saalweachter4• 5 months ago

I mean, the "exploit" is really "we have an access key with overly-broad permissions and poor monitoring", but that's ... also kind of like 70% of old hacker stories?

"The gate code is 1234" "If you punch in this code it tricks the phone network into thinking you're an operator" "The credentials 'guest'/'guest' work on this network".

You probably could have had five, ten people using the Antigravity API key for whatever and even if someone noticed it probably wouldn't have been worth the time to fix.

But it's like you learn the gate code for the employee parking lot and instead of just quietly enjoying free parking you start punching in the code and waving more and more cars into the lot until it's jammed full, and then complain when the code's changed and they post a guard outside checking IDs.

ValentineC4• 5 months ago

What weakness? What exploit? People have been using it in a way that was technically possible. And they paid for it, many purchased the product specifically because of it.

It's technically possible, but Google didn't provide a feature allowing the creation of Antigravity or Gemini CLI API keys for use outside the respective apps.

bigyabai• 5 months ago

they call people calling out Google for their monopolistic behavior whining.

Google's monopoly is not in AI, it's advertisement. When you accuse them of ridiculous and unfounded crimes, you're diluting the chance of Google being held accountable. As someone that wants to see Google ripped apart by the FTC, we can't just lie and say everything Google does is criminal.

JKCalhoun2• 5 months ago

Kind of a built-in feature of a Cool Thing is that it will get found/shared/widespread.

(See Napster.)

mschuster913• 5 months ago

You treasure these little tricks, use them cautiously, and only share them sparingly. They can last for years if you carefully fly under the radar, before they're fixed by accident when another system is changed. THEN you share tales of your exploits for fame and internet points.

It's the same with vulnerabilities in slot machines. Damn rare but they exist - in 2014, when I worked in that industry, one gang made a big bang: in a single night, casinos across Germany had to say goodbye to probably 10 million € [1]. Of course, that vulnerability made massive waves... but from what I heard back then, it had been circulating for many months beforehand. Of course, 10 million € is nothing to sneeze at, but keeping a low profile could have made everyone in the know far more profit.

[1] https://www.t-online.de/digital/aktuelles/id_68982394/softwa...

tda• 5 months ago

I fondly remember finding and exploiting a buggy slot machine on the night the Euro got introduced. A classmate (I never played slot machines) made some money but didn't understand what was going on. I observed and it became apparent (in my slightly intoxicated state) the machine would pay out 2 Euro coins where is should pay out 20 cents. And when playing a 1 Euro game, you would often "win" 80 cents. Pay-out immediately and you got 8 Euro. Of course after a few rounds, the 2 Euro coins ran out and it would do some RNG to pay out 1 Euro with 80% chance. Don't know if I tried feeding it back the 2 Euro coins, I recall just made enough to have a free new years eve

plorg• 5 months ago

Back in maybe 2017 there was a YC startup called Audm that hired professional audiobook narrators to read magazine articles. I found them through their embeds in The New Yorker. The app was pretty mediocre and I wanted to use it in my podcast app, so I started writing a scraper. Very quickly I realized that the page embeds were making calls directly to their production database with no authentication whatsoever. So I pivoted to dumping the entire archive, hosting it on my LAN, and serving it as RSS over my VPN. It was cool, and I found that articles from some publications would post as much as 2 weeks before publication. Eventually they were bought by the NYTimes, and in 2020 they either set up permissions or moved the infrastructure. I gave up on the project, and I understand that most of the content is no longer available. I unfortunately lost my archive with a lot of data when my storage array died a couple of years later. I think the product space got commoditized very quickly by AI readers (none of which, to my ear, are as engaging as the human professionals). I think maybe 4 other people knew about my project when it existed.

RobotToaster2• 5 months ago

you could exploit to get free/cheap thing

$249/mo isn't cheap

panarky• 5 months ago

If you pay $249 to get $1,200 of compute, "cheap" seems like the right word.

lucky-rathore• 5 months ago

wise. couldn't agree more. I

obsidianbases1• 5 months ago

Product usage subsidized by company, $100. Users inevitably figure out how to steal those subsidies, agents go brrrrr. Users mad that subsidy stealing gets cut off and completely ignore why they need to rely on subsidies in the first place, priceless.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47073097

I'd like to add, that's "priceless" for "them" and not for you.

rbbydotdev• 5 months ago

Ai has really struggled for a strong/kill-app use case for which supports such enormous humongous historical investments (TRILLIONS)

It looks like its been found. The irony is, these model providers are now saying : "not like that!"

aavci• 5 months ago

Is there any restrictions if you use something like OpenRouter?

snvzz• 5 months ago

Likely very legit restriction based on ToS violation.

People accounts shouldn't be used by bots. That's what service accounts are for.

NOBULEX• 5 months ago

This is exactly what happens when there's no accountability infrastructure for AI agents.

Google's response is to restrict access — a blunt instrument that punishes legitimate users because they have no way to verify which agents were behaving correctly and which weren't.

The real fix isn't restrictions, but cryptographic behavioral commitments — agents declare what they'll do before execution, and any third party can verify compliance after. We don't need gatekeepers. We need verification.

I've been building this: https://github.com/agbusiness195/NOBULEX

h4kunamata• 5 months ago

I am in that phase of my life that seeing people complaining about big techs gives me no sympathy.

These companies keep telling you that you own nothing, they change their TOS without informing you, they collect everything they can from you and yet, you spend $249/mo for their service.

I mean......

siefca• 5 months ago

This is funny because in this area the most valuable good is NOT knowledge, yet the dinosaurs behave like it was, protecting the wrong thing.

grigio• 5 months ago

Not your infra not your AI

beshtoev• 5 months ago

I guess Google feels unsafe, one way or another.

mcclark69• 5 months ago

You might want to read the terms of service next time before you utilize a service that you are unfamiliar with! Google refuses to let you use your oath with openclaw because they refuse to subsidize the slop that it is processing. It is not worth giving free frontier models from Google Gemini Pro for the basic tasks you are looking to complete with open claw I would know because I've been developing with AI for over a decade. Openclaw has a lot of potential. It's a pretty neat tool. I have to admit. My favorite part is that you can point the URL for the large language model to anywhere you want. Since most of you guys only have a rudimentary understanding of the difference between AI systems and know that there are options for local and cloud models, we are going to expand your knowledge base today. Cloud models are great. They are able to set their own terms. Google gives free compute with oath connections. They have stated very clearly that you must be a paid API user and that you are not able to use oath and using oath with openclaw will result in termination of your account immediately because the tasks you are asking Gemini to do are for a preschooler.. We have known this for at least a week at the Atlanta technology development Center and we were able to get an account restored by apologizing. However, we knew in advance that it was going to get nuked. This is actually an open claw issue not a Google issue because openclaw is the one that's still allows for 05 connections and is not made the change to single-handedly only permit API connections. If they only permitted API connections through Google Gemini they would stop any of their users from being banned but they haven't made that change yet. So if you are mad at someone be mad at Peter steinberger for not shipping faster or paying attention to terms of service or the recent slew of complaints from users. This isn't my department. I don't want to figure it out. You can handle it.

You really think Google wants to subsidize compute so that you can organize your freaking calendar you morons? Sounds like a great use of a data center where you could just click accept invite. Oh, you can't reply to text messages, so you trust AI to do it now. Wow! You must be the laziest piece of s** on the planet. Oh email's too much for you? Let me tell you what inbox zero as a mandatory process looks like when you wake up with 150 emails on average every single day over a a 7-year period and you handle every single one every single day before you leave the office with zero unread and zero pending reply. You get really good at making sure every single customer is handled. When customer service is not optional and your service level agreement is that you answer customers 24/7 365 you do it immediately without question and everything is solved before the lights are turned off and if something goes wrong at any time of the day that phone's getting picked up ring one and the problem is being solved before the line is hung up or there's an escalation to management and it is handled on the spot. Some of you are a little soft and don't actually believe in putting in the work or putting yourself in positions that will leave you slightly inconvenienced because it would be way too much to ask for you to stay 3 hours after work if that's what it takes to build a billion dollar company. I really hope you enjoy dinner with your family every single night at 4:59 p.m. Sharp while you get smoked by people that are actually staying at the office. So now that the only two options you think you have are paying someone for their large language model because you are poorly researched and don't know how to build your own system taking thousands of dollars and buying something with over a terabyte of RAM that spits out a hundred tokens a second. Maybe you can do that 10 times to get a thousand tokens a second if you really want to drop 100 Grand on new macbooks. That's about a quarter of the speed of meta which offers infinite free compute if you cleared their wait list as a developer(6+ month waitlist for consideration).If you don't have free compute from meta, I feel bad for you because they were giving 3,000 requests per minute until openclaw came out and that's only 10 requests per a minute because they got real tired real quick of these 24/7 agents taken up all the compute to do. Jack diddly s** I will tell you that. Claude grok meta Google and almost any frontier model you haven't heard of will give you infinite free compute if you are building products that have never been seen before. I'm not sure what Peter was doing spending 20,000 a month on compute. Does anyone have a figure on how many credits he burned? Cuz I'm in the tens of billions and my compute spend is $0 over 18 months. It's really interesting what happens to your account when you feed it, new data, new solutions and try to build theoretical software that is not currently possible with what is available today and then you come back when the new model comes out. They welcome you with open arms and they don't charge you to use it and they do a lot of heavy lifting without much of a cap. The point of this is to you mention that you do not need millions, probably even hundreds of thousands of parameters for your basic tasks that you are too lazy to handle yourself. I honestly am not so sure what any of you are doing with open claw when cursor builds much better software. In my professional opinion, the most effective way to utilize open claw is by building your own decision tree or something similar that has a pretty rigid process and follows exactly what it should do without thinking. You guys would be amazed to know that you can build a fully functional model that does everything you need and completes every task a customer will ask for with a 12 KB file it runs with less than 15% of your total compute on four cores and takes less than 2 GB of RAM on a web server. It provides instant response with no processing delay. It knows exactly what the customer is asking and matches it up with the correct response. It is able to process images using data sets which are also very lightweight because they are specific to your business. So next time you try to set up openclaw, ask whatever AI you're using just to rip out the apis that comes with and build your own model which you will host on your local system server. You might need to ask it to refactor for firebase or whoever else you're going to be hosting with. Go ahead and keep paying digitalocean $6 a month for the worst VM I've ever seen. That's a great investment and their current best practices go against the current best practices that open claw recommends, so I would not recommend any third party providers, even if they are worth $5 billion because they do not maintain as fast as openclaw ships. Any questions I'm available but I probably don't want to help you unless you're paying me a lot of money because I and I'm kind of a big deal in case you can't tell.

cyrusradfar• 5 months ago

Reading the thread, there are two non-issues and one big issue.

1. Can a company change their ToS to clarify that you can't "hack" their Oauth for other tools -- Yes, no question

2. Should they enforce the ToS, absolutely

The elephant in the room is Google has no support infrastructure and setup no notice drip campaign before they started banning out-right.

They could've easily rate-limited or even blocked requests authed from apps outside Anti-gravity, but banning entire accounts is pretty ridiculous. It'll just lose them very eager AI enthusiasts who are the audience they NEED to grow their new experiments.

It's bad business and not in their best long-term interests. Big fail. This is the way a startup may act because they're going broke on traffic -- not Google.

titaniumrain• 5 months ago

Google PR: "blame automation as we are not making money!"

lol, funny that this time they can't say "malicious users from china!"

ildar• 5 months ago

The OAuth token replay discussion here highlights a broader problem with the OpenClaw ecosystem: there is no standardized trust model between agents and the services they access.

When people grab OAuth tokens for replay in OpenClaw, they are essentially doing at the user level what malicious skills do at the agent level — bypassing intended access controls because the system has no way to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate use.

This is the same pattern showing up everywhere: - 312,000 instances on Shodan with no auth (CyberSecurityNews) - 40,000+ exposed instances (SecurityScorecard this week) - 824+ malicious skills in ClawHub - Infostealers now grabbing entire agent identities (Hudson Rock)

The common thread: agents operate with broad, undifferentiated access. No permission tiers, no credential isolation, no audit trail.

Until the ecosystem adds proper trust layers at both the platform level (what Google is clumsily trying to do here) and the host level (monitoring what agents actually do with their access), this cat-and-mouse will continue.

AlexeyBelov• 5 months ago

LLM bot.

oh-my-god• 5 months ago

My gemini cli access was restored today

Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw

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